Abbas Akhavan, Trisha Brown and Trisha Brown Dance Company, Rochelle Goldberg, Brian Jungen, Janice Kerbel, Christina Mackie, Jerry Pethick, Eileen Quinlan, Nick Sikkuark Unexplained Parade, Part One February 9–May 11, 2019
Always a question, the concept of progress: what direction is progress? A mythological state or object, progress is a concept of the future as a process of the present. Whatever progress might be, it is also a commodity that I walk and sleep with, a kind of tangible, like marbles in a boot.
The marble, progress, withdrawn from the boot, zooms to cabbage proportions in selection as do other separated signals that perform concept recognition. The neighbouring marbles of progress may be liberty and technology, context or history. Perhaps the marbles are nouns—static recognition models that freeze the flow and flexibility of words. Perhaps these words are riveted to spatial entities, assuming shape in the matrix of compressed and expanding attention; these states are denoted by perception, their substance a peripheral membrane only.
The play with contextuality, disjointed and random-seeming paradoxes, provides spatial gaps as building blocks. Words and images move across the papering of reality’s façade, sliding over the shallow space of representation’s symbols. Objects demand their own space, structured environment, ideas of substance, or densities of material relationships. Context becomes a tangible that tears like candyfloss and easily ruptures like melting ice.
—Excerpts from Jerry Pethick’s Le Dot: Transition in Progress, 1986
